Radiator Tea Cozy Keeps City Dwellers Comfy in Wintertime

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Coming off an intense heat wave, it may feel a bit early to think
about winter.

But a startup in Manhattan — which swings from sweltering to
frigid every year — is getting ready to test a solution for the
too-hot/too-cold dilemma of city dwellers with antique steam
radiators.

Called Radiator Labs, the company, an outgrowth of a Columbia
University student's project, has a simple but clever solution:
Cover each radiator with an insulating fabric and equip it with
thermometers and fans to pump out heat only when needed.

"I built the first unit in my apartment (university housing) and
it worked so well that we started a company based on the idea,"
Marshall Cox, the student founder, told TechNewsDaily in an
email.

Newer homes and buildings have multiple "zones" controlled by
individual thermometers. But in older buildings with steam heat
(more than 10 percent of U.S. housing, according to Radiator
Labs), the whole structure is essentially one zone.

A boiler heats steam that circulates through the entire building
and must keep the chilliest apartment above a certain minimum
temperature. But not all apartments lose heat at the same rate.
(Think of apartments with two outside walls vs. one, for example,
or a higher floor vs. a lower.)

To keep that hardest-to-heat apartment warm enough, every other
apartment has to be overheated. Hence the odd spectacle of
wide-open windows on bitter cold days as dwellers try to vent out
the excess, and ultimately wasted, heat.

Radiators generally have valves, but the old hardware is
frequently stuck or too fragile to risk fiddling with. And even
if they can, the best residents generally muster is to swing from
too hot to too cold as they alternately open and close the valve.
And according to Cox, setting the valve half open doesn't
decrease heat but does cause the pipe-banging sound so familair
in apartment buildings.

Radiator Labs simple solution consists of a thermal blanket
material — essentially an oven mitt — that fits over the radiator
and holds heat in. As the temperature in the room drops below a
level set by the user, a heating fan blows warm air out of the
enclosure. By using only the heat that's needed, the system
conserves it for the rest of the building.

Each radiator cover is wireless equipped, so a control system in
the basement can measure how much heat the entire building
requires and adjust accordingly, cutting into the $8.5 billion
that Radiator Labs reckons goes up the chimney every year due to
the inefficiency of primitive steam heat. The radiator covers are
also Internet connected, so people can adjust them from
smartphones, for example.

Radiator Labs is now outfitting the system in a 100-dorm building
on the Columbia University campus to see if it can work on a
large scale this coming winter.

The company is aiming to produce the covers for about $100
(selling them for somewhat more), so it might be worthwhile for
overheated individuals to get their own. But Radiator Labs is
also banking on landlords purchasing the system for an entire
building. If, as the company reckons, each radiator wastes at
least $100 per year, the retrofit would soon pay for itself.